Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling

• Honesty can be considered an important norm in any given society.
• However, the lack of generally-accepted games confounds our understanding.
• This paper reviews 63 economic and psychological experiments into honesty.
• The review compares and contrasts experimental design, treatments, and findings.
• Monitoring and intrinsic lying costs mitigate dishonest behavior.

Honesty toward strangers can be considered an important norm of any given society. However, despite burgeoning interest in honesty among experimenters, the heterogeneous nature of prior experimental designs obfuscates our understanding of this important topic. The present review of 63 economic and psychological experiments constitutes the first attempt to compare findings across a range of honesty experiments. Our findings across experimental designs suggest the robust presence of unconditional cheaters and non-cheaters, with the honesty of the remaining individuals being particularly susceptible to monitoring and intrinsic lying costs.